{photo inspiration: from the kitchen: making a healthier guacamole}

by on February 22, 2012

An almost {word­less wednes­day} inspired by this recipe I saw on tv and this recipe I pinned a few days ago…

This has a really sweet story. Over the week­end, I wanted to make gua­camole as a snack, and boy were we hun­gry… And as I cut the ava­cado, and looked at it, it just seemed so pretty! So I got my cam­era out. Then in comes my hus­band, and he sees what I was doing, and goes and lugs the stu­dio lights into the kitchen (which are so huge in our small kitchen that we all tripped over it!). He loves pho­tog­ra­phy. He loves food. So this became a 45 minute long event, and the end of which I was SO hun­gry I just kept star­ing at the plate of chips… Need­less to say, once the cam­era was set down, the plate was licked clean… YUM!

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Posted by Smitha on February 22, 2012

http://www.smilingcolors.com/2012/02/photo-inspiration-from-the-kitchen-making-a-healthier-guacamole/

{tuesday trigger: home sweet home}

by on February 21, 2012

Just had to had to come and share this card I made for today’s Tues­day Trig­ger at the Moxie Fab World…

Also play­ing along with the Bella Blvd’s Tues­day Chal­lenge: Use pat­terned papers from 4 or more col­lec­tions on your project.

Big thanks to Bella Blvd, who sent a big box full of good­ies, and these papers are just SO pretty and adorable.. I see a lay­out com­ing out of these very soon, maybe tonight :)

 Sup­plies used:
Card­stock: Bazzil basics
Pat­terned paper: Bella blvd
Stamp: Fiskars
Ink: Fiskars
Cor­ner edger: Fiskars
(stamp­ing on pat­terned paper)
Make card from card­stock and round one cor­ner. Stamp home image onto pink chevron pat­terned paper. Trim it using a sharp scis­sor. Free cut green pat­terned paper to form hill. Adhere onto card­stock and stamp sentiment.
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Posted by Smitha on February 21, 2012

http://www.smilingcolors.com/2012/02/tuesday-trigger-home-sweet-home/

{again and aGain…}

by on February 19, 2012

I had so much fun mak­ing this lay­out!  It was a fun sunny week­end after­noon with mommy daugh­ter craft time! I used up the scraps I had left of the SC Board­walk kit I have, and made this quick and pretty layout…

I used this Sun­day Sketch as a start­ing point, and I loved the idea of a scrap bor­der, so I built one on the right hand edge. It was too much work to adhere each piece of paper down sep­a­rately, so I just stitched them using my sewing  machine… For the left hand side, I used the lit­tle strip from the bot­tom of the paper, that tells us what pat­terned paper is on the back (I dont know if I explained that prop­erly…) to add  color and design.

Those pho­tos. Those were taken by my hus­band. Every few months, he sends me an email with all the pho­tos he took on his cell phone, and when I saw these I just gasped. This is exactly what Nidhi was last sum­mer– per­fectly cap­tured by the lens, and I loved the green tinge of the photos.

I am still kinda stuck on the Chevron idea, and I made this one using my square punch– the exact same method I used to make this card few from a few days ago…Also a new love, this bird punch!

As I said before, I am almost done with this SC kit, so I have prac­ti­cally fin­ished up all the good sticker  alpha­bets. I needed two ‘e’s for the title here, and for that I cre­atively used two ‘a’s like this… (rotate the ‘a’ upside down and then trim off a curve)

Thanks for stop­ping by today!

Sup­plies used:
Stu­dio Cal­ico Board­walk kit
Punches: Fiskars
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Posted by Smitha on February 19, 2012

http://www.smilingcolors.com/2012/02/again-and-again/

{inspiration “night”; in photos}

by on February 18, 2012

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Posted in Photography
Posted by Smitha on February 18, 2012

http://www.smilingcolors.com/2012/02/inspiration-night-in-photos/

{Freebie Friday: a free printable “miss you” card}

by on February 17, 2012

Hi every­one! And wel­come to my very first Free­bie Fri­day! I hope you enjoyed my ear­lier Tuto­r­ial Thurs­day post (which this bril­liant mommy posted on a wednes­day think­ing it was a thurs­day, coz evi­dently she has lost the capac­ity to keep track of the days of the week!) :D

Remem­ber my last free­bie, these Project life print­able 3 by 4 jour­nal­ing cards I posted few days ago? Well, just an hour ago, my friend Jen emailed me this lay­out that she made using them!!! OMG! I lit­er­ally jumped out of my skin when I saw it! It is so pretty and beau­ti­ful and it was so sweet of her to share it with me. You can check out her blog My scrap tales to see more of her beau­ti­ful and inspir­ing work (and she has free dig­i­tal lay­out tem­plates too! where you just drag and drop your papers+ pho­tos and be done)

Mov­ing on, for this weeks free­bie, I have some­thing that you might have seen before (and I am already work­ing on some­thing a-MAZ-ing for next Fri­day! Fun, fun fun times!!!)

Down­load here

This is a free print­able card, you just feed a 8.5 by 11 inch card­stock sheet into your printer and hit the print but­ton. Then trim the card to size, and fold. Viola, a pretty card is ready for you to use :)

(I added some tiny pearls here to act as punctuations)

Let me know if you guys find this use­ful! If there is some­thing on my blog that you have found inter­est­ing and would like a free­bie of it, point it out to me and lets see what I can do…

PS: My give­away is still open, and you could win TWO amaz­ing sets of FISKARS stamps. Just go and leave a com­ment on this post to be eligible.

Now I need to go and find some socks for these cold feet…

PPS: did you know, that while think­ing of names for my blog two years ago, “Ten frozen toes” was num­ber two on the list?

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Posted by Smitha on February 17, 2012

http://www.smilingcolors.com/2012/02/freebie-friday-a-free-printable-miss-you-card/

{Tutorial Thursday: Family History Wall Art}

by on February 15, 2012

Thank you very much for all of the love you left at my blog for yesterday’s post! (the give­away is still open, just scroll down…) Each one of them were spe­cial, and made me smile :)

Of late, I think I have been blog­ging on a lot of dif­fer­ent top­ics. There is scrap­book­ing, card mak­ing, sewing, quilt­ing, baby stuff, pho­tog­ra­phy and tons of dig­i­tal craft­ing stuff. I really don’t know how my read­ers (if I have any?) feel about this, but I feel that I need to orga­nize things around here a bit more. Get things in focus a lit­tle bit. So I am going to be start­ing two new series on my blog: a tuto­r­ial thurs­day and a free­bie fri­day: which will occur every week. I hope to stick to this plan and  see where it goes!

So for today, I have a tuto­r­ial to share with you; about pre­serv­ing fam­ily his­tory and its impor­tance in kids lives. My lit­tle girl Nidhi is just two and half years old, so instead of mak­ing a fam­ily tree, (which I am sure to make once she is older and under­stands the word ‘cousin’) I chose to make a wall art of pho­tos span­ning 3 gen­er­a­tions. She can iden­tify each of these pho­tos and loves stop­ping by it and talk­ing to me about the pho­tos. For me, every­time I walk past it, it reminds me of who I am, and how impor­tant these peo­ple have been in sculpt­ing my life and how grate­ful I am for every­thing that they are.

I scanned and resized the pho­tos to mea­sure 2 by 2 inches and then printed them at Costco. I could have recol­ored the pho­tos, so that they all looked sim­i­lar, but I wanted to trea­sure the ances­try of these pho­tos. They have been pre­served and cher­ished for years now, and I wanted that love to show…

(PS: Our kids call us Amma(=MOM) and Appa(=Dad))Here is a photo of the com­pleted project.

And you can find my step by step tuto­r­ial with pho­tos to make this project HERE, on the Fiskars blog.

This was a very very mean­ing­ful project for me, and I love love LOVE how it turned out! It cur­rently hangs above my craft space (I wanted to share a photo of how chaotic the cre­ative process is! This is the main part of  my scrap space and I am cur­rently in the mid­dle of mak­ing two lay­outs. And the whole space was pris­tine clean just two days ago{sigh} My hus­band and I share the office space and my craft table  just doesnt stay clean long enough for my hus­bands liking.

See you tomor­row with my Free­bie Friday!

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Posted in Fiskars tutorial, Hybrid Scrapbooking, Scrapbooking
Posted by Smitha on February 15, 2012

http://www.smilingcolors.com/2012/02/tutorial-thursday-family-history-wall-art/

{project life: february… & a giveaway & a freebie too!}

by on February 14, 2012

Happy Valentine’s Day you all!!!

Long post ahead. Be warned. (Actu­ally it isnt SUCH a long post, but it is really really late in the night/almost morn­ing, so I feel it is longggg.….) But it will be worth your time coz I have good­ies to share at the end! And if you are a Project lifer I have some FREE cute print­a­bles for you to down­load as well!

This year I am doing Project life dig­i­tally. And monthly instead of weekly (you can read more about that in my first PL post here). I am scrap­ping ahead, and though this lay­out says feb­ru­ary– it con­tains pho­tos mainly from mid jan to mid feb. And I am OK with that. I am just super happy to be scrap­ping the NOW while it is still fresh in my mind.

What is best about Project life is that it is so adapt­able, so flex­i­ble and so much fun! I love how freeformed the design is and how all the col­ors are chaotic, yet sing together :) Am very glad that I took on this project, and so far have been able to stay on track. Here is this month’s two page spread…

(click on image to see enlarged version)

This months lay­out is in a top ten for­mat. Top ten lists about the girls and us with top ten pho­tos to go with them :)

And a look at each page seper­ately, this one is my big girl Nidhi’s page…

and this one is my lit­tle baby Shreya’s page…

I used some of the new hor­i­zon­tal jour­nal­ing cards (avail­able at www.jessicasprague.com), they are super friendly to use. I also used the cam­era jour­nal­ing cards by Splen­did Fiins (linked in the sup­plies below)

And.… I made some of my own jour­nal­ing cards. There was this 40 minute win­dow I got today, while both the girls took a nap (which has not occured once in the past 4 months!), and I used it to play around in Pho­to­shop, do some typog­ra­phy of my own :)

And so I have six 3 by 4 inch jour­nal­ing cards, 3 hor­i­zon­tal and 3 ver­ti­cal– a per­fect addi­tion for your this weeks Project life. Valen­tine day themed.

Click HERE to down­load the file. There is a .png file if you want to use it dig­i­tally and also print­able versions.

Print­ing them is super easy and sim­ple. Just feed a 8.5 by 11 inch white or cream card­stock into your printer instead of reg­u­lar paper. I don’t change my printer set­tings, just hit print. The only draw­back you will see is that the card­stock will absorb the ink a lot more than reg­u­lar paper, so let it dry for an extra minute, just to be safe.

Down­load Valentine4PL

I am also join­ing in on the Project life Tues­day at The Mom Cre­ative! I love the energy they have here and I also love that it gives me a dead­line. Since  my Project life is going to be monthly, I will be post­ing on the sec­ond Tues­day each month…

The Mom Creative

Oooh! I was about to say bye, com­pletely for­get­ting about the give­away I have planned. The scrap­book­ing indus­try has been so gen­er­ous to me, and I have con­tin­u­ously received prod­ucts from many many dif­fer­ent sources, all deliv­ered to my doorstep. So I feel its about time I give back, and do a give­away of my own. Good Karma right?

Since its Valentine’s day, I have two LOVE-able stamp sets by Fiskars up for the grab. The Just Mar­ried and Last­ing Love clear stamp sets.

Just leave a com­ment below  and I will mail out both of these stamp sets to one ran­domly drawn win­ner. You might want to like my Face­book page (I have another give­away com­ing up soon, just for those fans!)

This give­away will be open until next tues­day. Unfor­tu­nately, I can only mail these within Con­ti­nen­tal US. Not internationally.

Good luck and thanks for stay­ing with me so long and hope you have a great Valen­tines day!!!

Sup­plies used:
Cam­era love 3by4 jour­nal­ing cards: Splen­did Fiins
List love jour­nal­ing cards: Splen­did Fiins
Hor­i­zon­tal jour­nal­ing cards: Becky Hig­gins, Clemen­tine Edition
Num­bered Tick­ets: Erica Her­nan­dez
Love+ Love jour­nal­ing card: Smitha Katti
Fonts: CK Ali hand, Hel­vetica LT, Geor­gia, Amer­i­can typewriter
Soft­ware: Adobe Pho­to­shop CS5
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Posted in Digital Scrapbooking, Hybrid Scrapbooking, Jessica Sprague Products, Project Life, Scrapbooking
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Posted by Smitha on February 14, 2012

http://www.smilingcolors.com/2012/02/project-life-february-a-giveaway-a-freebie-too/

{forever together…}

by on February 13, 2012

Hello every­body! Blog­ging from the kitchen today, while din­ner sim­mers and I play wwf with the hubby (who is con­ve­niently seated nearby on the sofa, and yells out “your turn Smitha” even before the game pings for me :)

I finally got myself a Word­Press app and am using my iPad for some­thing other than my daily dose of pin­ter­est for the first time! I could get used to this…

So. With all the cards I make you would fig­ure that I had a great one to give the said hus­band for tomorrow’s valen­tines day. I have many cards, but none that he would appre­ci­ate receiv­ing. So I sat and made a spe­cial one for him today.

To make the chevron-like pat­tern on the card, I used a sim­ple square punch so.


Use the punched out square for some other project, we only need the neg­a­tive por­tion here. Place the neg­a­tive por­tion in the square punch as seen below and punch again to get a chevron like ele­ment. Punch sev­eral of these, of vary­ing widths and line them up on your card.

There is about an hour left before ThePunches Chal­lenge in the Moxie Fab World ends, so I am typ­ing this up hur­riedly here!

His card was made with all graph­ics 45 prod­ucts and I love love love how it turned out! I already gave it to him ( I am totally bad pat keep­ing secrets!) and he loved it too…

I think this has to be one of my favorite projects I have made in a while now.

I have also been work­ing on my Project life all day today and LOVE it so much! The process, the pho­tos, the free­dom of design, the chaos of color… It is just so so good.

I am gonna have some free Project Life print­a­bles for you all tomor­row, and there is also gonna be a CUTE give­away !!! Stay tuned.

Happy Valentine’s Day to those of you who are already at the 14th!

 

Sup­plies used:
Card­stock: The paper company
Pat­terned papers: Graphic 45
Brad: Basic grey
Punches: But­ter­fly, square: Fiskars
Rib­bon: Graphic 45
Sen­ti­ment words: Authentique
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Posted by Smitha on February 13, 2012

http://www.smilingcolors.com/2012/02/forever-together/

{its a valentine extravaganza!…}

by on February 12, 2012

If you are mak­ing just one Valen­tine this year for your loved one, or need to mass pro­duce them for your kids class, here are a few/lots of inspi­ra­tion for you :)

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Posted by Smitha on February 12, 2012

http://www.smilingcolors.com/2012/02/its-a-valentine-extravaganza/

{thanks and birthday boy cards…}

by on February 11, 2012

I have had two extremely busy days! Back to back. Life has been busy and I love that! I did get some cards done, just haven’t had time to sit at the com­puter to blog them (might be because a cer­tain lit­tle girl is hav­ing a growth spurt and wakes me up in at 4am demand­ing for food :)

But, that same said lit­tle girl loves to craft with me, and we try to spend a lit­tle time in the stu­dio daily. And I got these two cards done,

First one, for the CAS-ual Fri­days chal­lenge: Paper piec­ing, a fun one!

I used all Echo Park embel­lies here. They have a new line com­ing out on Mon­day, a per­fect lit­tle guy line name “A boys life” which will be avail­able at www.jessicasprague.com

(Since I have two lit­tle girls, this blue, green yel­low boy palette was def­i­nitely new to me!)

The other card, I made for this new chal­lenge I came across at the Craft Marathon: Use the color Apple green.

I absolutely loved this chal­lenge. I pulled out really old sup­plies here– rib­bons and scrap papers from the bot­tom of the draw­ers. Punched the large tri­an­gles and weaved in the rib­bons. This was just soo much fun for me :)

I have loads of pho­tog­ra­phy to share with you all, hope­fully soon!

I also wanted to send a big thank out to Paper­craft Inspi­ra­tion for the shoutout about my blog here. I have a card of mine being pub­lished in their mag­a­zine soon!

Sup­plies used:
Happy birth­day boy card:
Card­stock: Wausau
Soft­ware: Adobe Pho­to­shop CS5
Papers, sen­ti­ments: Echo Park
Fonts: CK Ali Hand
Thanks:
Card­stock: The paper company
Pat­terned papers: Bella Blvd, My minds eye, Echo park
Rib­bons: Stamp­ing up
Alpha stick­ers: Colorbok
Scal­loped fab­ric mista­bles: Pink paislee
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Posted in Cards, Hybrid Scrapbooking, Jessica Sprague Products
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Posted by Smitha on February 11, 2012

http://www.smilingcolors.com/2012/02/a-birthday-boy-and-a-thanks-card/

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